Sony claims PlayStation 3 hacker sabotaged hard drive then left town

Sony is accusing
alleged PlayStation 3
hacker George Hotz of surrendering two "nonfunctional" hard drives in
violation of a court order, and then taking off to South
America.

But Hotz's lawyer said on Wednesday that Sony is "crying
alligator tears" over the issue.

Sony is suing the 21-year-old man from the US on charges he
violated the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act by publishing an encryption key and
software tools in January that allow PlayStation 3 owners to gain
complete control of their consoles. As part of the litigation, a
San Francisco federal magistrate ordered Hotz to surrender his hard
drives to Sony, so files connected to the hack can be extracted and
used as evidence in the case.

But Sony notified the judge that, when it got the drives from
Hotz, they were no longer working. "Hotz had removed integral
components from his impounded hard drives, rendering them completely non-functional." (.pdf), the company claimed in a
filing.

Stewart Kellar, Hotz's attorney, said the issue is
overblown.

"They didn't have the controller
card attached. That's it," Kellar said in a telephone
interview Wednesday from his San Francisco office.

He said that Hotz has since turned over the cards, solving the
problem.

Sony did not respond for comment.

Hotz, who is also well-known in iPhone hacking
circles, so far is fighting the case on jurisdictional grounds, and
maintains he should be sued in New Jersey instead of
California.

As part of that battle, Sony claimed that it uncovered evidence
that Hotz maintained an account on Sony's PlayStation Network,
which is based in Northern California. Hotz had denied holding a
PSN account.

In its filing, Sony also pointed out that Hotz has left the
country.

"Hotz conveniently travelled to South America in the midst of
jurisdictional discovery, including his court-ordered deposition,"
Sony said.

"I don't want to comment on that stuff," Kellar said. "He has
done nothing to make himself unavailable."

Magistrate Judge Joseph Spero has signed off on Sony subpoenas (.pdf) to Twitter, YouTube,
Google and
PayPal as part of the console-maker's scorched-earth litigation
tactics to win an unspecified amount of monetary damages from Hotz.
Spero has also granted Sony the right to acquire the internet IP addresses of anybody who has visited Hotz's
website from January 2009 to the present.

SoftLayer Technologies, which counts psx-scene.com among its
hosted sites, is objecting to a records demand seeking server logs and
other information related to Hotz's account on the online
PlayStation forum.

The DMCA prohibits the trafficking of so-called "circumvention
devices" designed to crack copy-protection schemes. Hotz's hack
provides PlayStation 3 owners the ability to run pirated and
home-brewed software or alternative operating systems like Linux.
Performing a similar hack on a mobile phone is not illegal.